In Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People," the protagonist Hulga, spends her entire adult life doing her best to deny and rebel against her mother's optimistic attitude. Hulga is a highly educated southern woman who lost her leg in an accident at the age of ten and suffers from a heart ailment. Due to these hardships, at thirty-two she still lives with her mother. The highly educated Hulga feels superior to those around her due to their lack of education and complexity. Hulga has no control over the negative emotions she feels, and allows these incidents to shape the remainder of her life. O'Connor uses Hulga to demonstrate how an intense feeling of hostility and intellectual superiority can damage relationships, inhibit intellectual and emotional growth, and blind one to reality.

Hulga despises her situation and believes that she is mentally above those around her, therefore, she feels no need to develop her relations with them. She resents the heart

Hulga's introduction to reality is humiliating. Whether or not she learns from this painful experience is a question left unanswered. There is hope for her if she sheds her air of intellectual superiority and realizes that no one person has all of the answers to life's questions.

condition that forces her to stay with her mother instead of getting a lecturing job at a university, and she punishes her mother each day by being rude. Hulga, "had made it plain that if it had not been for this condition she would be far from these red hills and good country people." She seemingly has no interest in men either. According to her mother, she looks at them "as if she could smell their stupidity".

Mrs. Hopewell neither acknowledges Hulga's pain nor makes any attempt to comfort her child. Mrs. Hopewell would prefer Hulga to conceal her bitterness. She says "people who looked on the bright side of things would be beautiful even if they were not". Hulga's decision to change her name from Joy is symbolic of the pe

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O'Connor Hulga, Manley Pointer, Country People, country people, hulga feels, highly educated, intellectual superiority, blind reality,
Approximate Word count = 685
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)